I have to stick up for New Jack City-- It, like a lot of these great 90s films, understood something studio-era Hollywood knew, which is that great supporting roles can go a long way. It's hard to forget a character like Duh Duh Duh Man, but I'll be damned if I can remember anyone from the Departed except via vague association with the actor who played them.

Oh man, Stay Tuned was my favorite film when I was a kid-- I was there in the theatre on opening day, believe it. It probably shares a huge burden with Mad Magazine and the Simpsons in shaping my sense of humor as a child. I am sure it doesn't hold up at all now, even with someone like Eugene Levy involved, but curiosity will get the better of me one of these days.

I actually only saw Miracle Mile last year, in close proximity to another cable staple I somehow never saw, Night of the Comet, and it's a good thing I didn't see it as a kid, because as I think I've said before, nuclear war is probably the only thing that actually "scares" me, and man, what a fun paranoic treat this film is. Were it not for the total 80s mise-en-scene, Miracle Mile could pass for a great Corman film from the 50s.

Speaking of Night of the Comet, how about the genuinely bizarre, watch it on the weekend and talk about it in school with your friends on Monday like it was a shared dream experience of Killer Klowns From Outer Space?

Now you're talking my language. Killer Klowns is just such a great experience because it tries so hard to have it both ways with a sense of genuine threat and comedy. I find it so bizarre to laugh at the toilet sequence one minute and than the next have the dean from Animal House creep me the hell out with that puppet moment. It's not even like the film is successful on those shifts in tone, but the experience is too enjoyable for me to care much.

Well, Night of the Comet is pure 80s. It feels like a John Hughes movie takes a left turn into Zombie-world. Of course, they smooth out the transition into "genre" by casting the guy from Eating Raoul and the girlfriend from The Last Starfighter.

Another pure 80s piece of fun with an odd setting that I always enjoyed was Streets of Fire. It's also one of those movies where it seems like every member of the supporting cast went on to have a better career than the nominal star at the time. I mean, it was a Micheal Pare vehicle where the primary supporting roles were played by Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Willem Dafoe, and Amy Madigan and with smaller bit parts filled by people like Bill Paxton, Robert Townsend, and Ed Begley Jr. (I believe just slightly pre-St. Elsewhere).

For something that showed up on cable networks a lot more back when Don Johnson was hot, how about A Boy and his Dog?

Oh wow, I love A Boy and His Dog - Jason Robards in whiteface and Don Johnson having an unfortunate encounter with a milking machine! And I've always wanted a talking dog ever since seeing this!

And Night of the Comet is strangely joyous for a film about the end of the world (something the Resident Evil films could have cribbed from) - as long as the sisters are OK and they have a hot potential boyfriend and access to all of the shops, who cares that the nasty stepmother and the rest of humanity (including the guy who kept beating your high score on the arcade machine) got fried to a crisp or turned into zombies? A very 80s philosophy!

Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Jul 26, 2011 5:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Oh man, Stay Tuned was my favorite film when I was a kid-- I was there in the theatre on opening day, believe it. It probably shares a huge burden with Mad Magazine and the Simpsons in shaping my sense of humor as a child. I am sure it doesn't hold up at all now, even with someone like Eugene Levy involved, but curiosity will get the better of me one of these days.

Wow, I remember seeing a trailer for that as a kid on one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VHS's back in the day and every now and then it would pop in my head and I'd wonder what it was, thanks for the nostalgia trip, I may finally see this.

You're generally right, but I liked how the film opens with a very anti-80s philosophy of being a horror movie and not really punishing the teenage girl who absently sleeps with her co-worker at the movie theatre-- though he does bite it, doesn't he? Well, still

And the co-worker was broadly played as not particularly sympathetic, caring more about getting the film reels back on time that staying with our heroine - which makes it OK that he gets horribly killed!

I seem to remember Stay Tuned having a really nice animated sequence in it, which I think must have predated that Simpsons Halloween episode where Bart and Lisa go into an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon and have a similarly traumatic time. I kind of bracket it with the channel hopping Amazon Women On The Moon or those wilder sections of Gremlins 2 detailing all of the various TV shows being made by Clamp Industries.

Well, under the heading of "strange B-films", I remember a movie that kept showing up late at night that was called something like The Blood of Heroes starring Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen. It was a post-apocalyptic wasteland sports movie; the goal of the sport was to get a dog's skull on the spike defended by the other team and some of the players carried chain flails or blunt pole arms.

Is this also a sci-film film with a scene in a space bar or something - maybe it was post-apolcalyptic? If so, I'm in it as an extra in that bar scene. It was filmed at the Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis-Brown house, and my friend was an electrician on it. I went to visit - it was a film starring Hauer & Chen. And someone said hey if you want to visit you have to be an extra, they put me in a costume that resembled a body size blue fruit peel, and I was basically acting like a male prostitute talking with a guy with no legs, in a wheel chair, at the bar. Never seen the film though and I didn't even know what it was called.

Killer Klowns was always my fave running the channels. And Better Off Dead if it was on. Ended up buying a DVD of the latter.

For an entire generation of kids, this sound meant that some shit was about to go down. The anticipation and wonder of sneaking into the living room late at night and turning to those premiums channels is a sensation that I regret this generation will never experience; the blatant, wild vulgarity of internet porn is not the same. And when I'm up late channel-surfing, I sometimes feel genuinely sad that television is unable to invoke it from me again. In those days, my door was open to mystery...

The closest channel these days that to me emulates this 'what will I see next?' feeling of mystery is MGM-HD. It isn't widely carried and it does have commercial breaks in-between movies and at the halfway mark (two minutes) but the flicks themselves are uncensored. From westerns to low-budget and from classics to direct-to-video Sybil Danning 80's action flicks (with Woody Allen stuff on permanent rotation and in high-def), there's a retro-cool vibe to the stuff MGM-HD shows (helped immensely that a lot of the stuff they show bombed theatrically and was little-seen outside of their cable rotation heyday) that is one of my most-watched movie channels.

Also, because they have little movie studio product left that they have access to (and getting slimmer), the Showtime extra channels (Beyond, etc.) sometimes get old stuff to fill in their schedules that isn't available elsewhere. A few weeks ago I saw 'The Medusa Touch' on Showtime 2 at 6AM (in HD!). This one was on permanent rotation in NYC's Late or Late Late Movie on Channel 7 through most of the 80's and through the 90's (where I first discovered it). Richard Burton freaking out (close-ups of glassy-eyed face helped) as 'the man that can create disasters' crashing a toy plane against a building, Lee Remick as the shrink that tries to help him and a cool/suave Lino Ventura as the French detective (think Clouseau but actually competent) trying to piece it all together... what's not to love? When I saw the 'bouncing bricks of Minster Cathedral (i.e. Westnister Abbey)' finale I was in absolute geek cinema heaven. :)

Wow, this thread is really taking me back and I'm surprised by some of the movies mentioned (I'm not sure how well it would hold up now but I remember thinking Stay Tuned was genius at the time.)

Happy to see all of the love for Romeo is Bleeding as I thought my brother and I were the only people that loved this film. I remember when this film first came out and I had been dying to see it but nowhere near me was showing it. And then when it came out on VHS no rental store near me stocked it (not even the Blockbuster in the next town over.) It actually became my very first "blind purchase" when it finally came out for sale and (ironically I found it at that same Blockbuster) and fell in love with it. Oldman was great and for me Lena Olin was the hottest woman ever at the time (and still is!) But other than my brother no one that I showed this film to seemed at all enthused with it, and it's one of the first films of many where I realized that I looked for different things in movies in comparison to my friends. They had a horrific reaction to it (not as bad as when I first showed them Brazil or, much later, Very Bad Things mind you.)

EDIT: And I just ordered the DVD since I realized I still only have the VHS.

Also, because they have little movie studio product left that they have access to (and getting slimmer), the Showtime extra channels (Beyond, etc.) sometimes get old stuff to fill in their schedules that isn't available elsewhere. A few weeks ago I saw 'The Medusa Touch' on Showtime 2 at 6AM (in HD!). This one was on permanent rotation in NYC's Late or Late Late Movie on Channel 7 through most of the 80's and through the 90's (where I first discovered it). Richard Burton freaking out (close-ups of glassy-eyed face helped) as 'the man that can create disasters' crashing a toy plane against a building, Lee Remick as the shrink that tries to help him and a cool/suave Lino Ventura as the French detective (think Clouseau but actually competent) trying to piece it all together... what's not to love? When I saw the 'bouncing bricks of Minster Cathedral (i.e. Westnister Abbey)' finale I was in absolute geek cinema heaven.

Major spoilers!:

Medusa Touch is great cheesy fun. I like the way that Britain's worst nuclear incident (as I guess the UK was 'trying to do an Iran' in today's language! Where was Hilllary Clinton then!!) is worked into the climax of the film with the barely conscious Burton tracing out the word 'Windscale'. The whole area had been 'rebranded' in the 70s after that incident by BNFL and now even has its own visitor centre, as this mid 90s advert illustrates! Although it has now been transferred to a limited company since this time.

Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Jul 27, 2011 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Happy to see all of the love for Romeo is Bleeding as I thought my brother and I were the only people that loved this film. I remember when this film first came out and I had been dying to see it but nowhere near me was showing it. And then when it came out on VHS no rental store near me stocked it (not even the Blockbuster in the next town over.) It actually became my very first "blind purchase" when it finally came out for sale and (ironically I found it at that same Blockbuster) and fell in love with it.

I remember renting it at Blockbuster right around the time it came out (must've been shortly after the Viacom buy-out) and being incredulous that there were no scenes involving violence. As soon as any violence was about to take place, the screen would abruptly go black for several seconds before moving on to the next scene. It had obviously been censored. I never trusted or felt good about Blockbuster after that. And I never did get around to seeing Romeo is Bleeding in its complete form.

I have a strange little hobby about premium channels. For years and years and years, I've been obsessed with which premium (and to a lesser extent, basic cable) network gets which studio's films. Both new releases and older films. I've never even admitted this before, but it's always been something I keep an eye on.

That's how I remember it too and actually a lot of specific scenes and plot points are seared into my skull I saw it so many times on HBO, but with that cast and director I feel that in spite of my memories it has to be horrible. All the same I can't help but crack up remembering how Arnold first acts in the movie. He's so pathetic at that point that I should be sad, but instead I just give a good chuckle. It's only the ending with the kids that I remember not liking.